Untangling where your hair extensions really come from from freeamfva's blog
Go online in search of a wig or hair extensions and you'll be presented with a dizzying spectrum of choices. "Luxury" virgin hair from Brazil or Peru. "Pure" Mongolian hair. "Finest remy" hair from India. Sleek European weaves. But very rarely will you see hair from China advertised - even though that's where most of it is from.To get more news about human hair wigs, you can visit monavirginhair.com official website.
China is the biggest exporter and importer of human hair and harvests huge amounts from its own population, as Emma Tarlo discovered on a three-year quest to untangle what happens to hair once it is no longer attached to our heads."People who work in the industry are conscious of the fact Made in China is viewed as a negative label and market it in more glamorous ways instead," says the professor of anthropology and author of Entanglement: The Secret Lives of Hair.
Consult the many online hair glossaries, blogs and tutorials and you'll be told that Chinese hair is the coarsest, that Filipino hair is similar but much shinier, that Brazilian hair is "full-bodied with a beautiful bounce" and Indian hair is "versatile with a natural lustre". Definitions are as varied as they are vague.
"The more you try to make sense of it, the more elusive it becomes," says Tarlo. "European hair is the most valuable, partly because of its fine textures, the variety of its colours and because it is in shorter supply." Most of this hair comes from countries in Eastern Europe, such as Russia, Romania, or Ukraine.
At the top end of the market is "virgin" hair - hair that has never been chemically treated - and "remy" hair, which has been cut or shaved directly from a donor.
And then at the opposite end of the scale is "standard hair" - often used as a more marketable term for comb waste. Yes, Chinese or otherwise, many sleek and shiny hair extensions start life as hairballs, collected from combs and plugholes.Chinese factories will often call the comb waste hair 'standard hair' because a lot of the hair comes through that route," says Tarlo.
"In terms of marketing it's up to the integrity of traders all the way along the line to specify what hair is what. Quite a lot of mislabelling goes on and often the people buying it don't ask questions anyway.""People don't want to be haunted by the ghosts of the people from whom the hair has come. There is still a 'yuk' factor to the whole idea of buying and wearing other people's body parts," she says. The whole supply chain is shrouded in secrecy from beginning to end.
There is a whole industry around untangling, sorting and treating comb waste. While the finished product invariably passes through China on the way to its final destination, it is likely to be a mishmash of hair from many Asian countries. "There is no distinction, it all gets mangled up," says Tarlo.
"All over Asia, long-haired women will save the hair that comes out when they comb or wash it and once they've got a few years' worth they'll sell it to the pedlars who go around these neighbourhoods calling out for hair," says Tarlo. Out of a bag she pulls some of her own hair - it's a dusty mound of comb-waste collected over three years and worth about 80p ($1), she says.
All this hair gets amassed, passed from trader to trader, until it ends up in hair-untangling workshops in parts of Bangladesh, India and more recently Myanmar - countries where wages are low and people need work.
Tarlo visited workshops and homes in Myanmar and India, where she saw dozens of women sitting on the floor untangling other people's hairballs and then sorting them into bunches based on their length. "It's painstaking work, and very labour intensive - 1.5kg (3.3lb) of hair takes around 80 hours of labour to untangle" she says.In Myanmar women were given 100g (3.5oz) of hair in the morning and another 100g in the afternoon. Villagers would also come in to buy mounds of the comb waste to take home, untangle and then sell back to the hair brokers.
Next comes the processing. The outer layer of a hair - the cuticle - has scales, all of which point in the same direction, like the scales of a fish. But the problem with comb waste is that hair is mangled up - the scales point in different directions causing it to tangle and knot. In China the hair is typically put in a chemical bath to remove the cuticle completely, Tarlo explains. "This resolves the tangling but the lack of a cuticle results in somewhat lower quality hair," she says. "Nonetheless, by the end of this process it can look fantastic, like prize pony tails. You wouldn't know what a journey that hair has been on."
China is the biggest exporter and importer of human hair and harvests huge amounts from its own population, as Emma Tarlo discovered on a three-year quest to untangle what happens to hair once it is no longer attached to our heads."People who work in the industry are conscious of the fact Made in China is viewed as a negative label and market it in more glamorous ways instead," says the professor of anthropology and author of Entanglement: The Secret Lives of Hair.
Consult the many online hair glossaries, blogs and tutorials and you'll be told that Chinese hair is the coarsest, that Filipino hair is similar but much shinier, that Brazilian hair is "full-bodied with a beautiful bounce" and Indian hair is "versatile with a natural lustre". Definitions are as varied as they are vague.
"The more you try to make sense of it, the more elusive it becomes," says Tarlo. "European hair is the most valuable, partly because of its fine textures, the variety of its colours and because it is in shorter supply." Most of this hair comes from countries in Eastern Europe, such as Russia, Romania, or Ukraine.
At the top end of the market is "virgin" hair - hair that has never been chemically treated - and "remy" hair, which has been cut or shaved directly from a donor.
And then at the opposite end of the scale is "standard hair" - often used as a more marketable term for comb waste. Yes, Chinese or otherwise, many sleek and shiny hair extensions start life as hairballs, collected from combs and plugholes.Chinese factories will often call the comb waste hair 'standard hair' because a lot of the hair comes through that route," says Tarlo.
"In terms of marketing it's up to the integrity of traders all the way along the line to specify what hair is what. Quite a lot of mislabelling goes on and often the people buying it don't ask questions anyway.""People don't want to be haunted by the ghosts of the people from whom the hair has come. There is still a 'yuk' factor to the whole idea of buying and wearing other people's body parts," she says. The whole supply chain is shrouded in secrecy from beginning to end.
There is a whole industry around untangling, sorting and treating comb waste. While the finished product invariably passes through China on the way to its final destination, it is likely to be a mishmash of hair from many Asian countries. "There is no distinction, it all gets mangled up," says Tarlo.
"All over Asia, long-haired women will save the hair that comes out when they comb or wash it and once they've got a few years' worth they'll sell it to the pedlars who go around these neighbourhoods calling out for hair," says Tarlo. Out of a bag she pulls some of her own hair - it's a dusty mound of comb-waste collected over three years and worth about 80p ($1), she says.
All this hair gets amassed, passed from trader to trader, until it ends up in hair-untangling workshops in parts of Bangladesh, India and more recently Myanmar - countries where wages are low and people need work.
Tarlo visited workshops and homes in Myanmar and India, where she saw dozens of women sitting on the floor untangling other people's hairballs and then sorting them into bunches based on their length. "It's painstaking work, and very labour intensive - 1.5kg (3.3lb) of hair takes around 80 hours of labour to untangle" she says.In Myanmar women were given 100g (3.5oz) of hair in the morning and another 100g in the afternoon. Villagers would also come in to buy mounds of the comb waste to take home, untangle and then sell back to the hair brokers.
Next comes the processing. The outer layer of a hair - the cuticle - has scales, all of which point in the same direction, like the scales of a fish. But the problem with comb waste is that hair is mangled up - the scales point in different directions causing it to tangle and knot. In China the hair is typically put in a chemical bath to remove the cuticle completely, Tarlo explains. "This resolves the tangling but the lack of a cuticle results in somewhat lower quality hair," she says. "Nonetheless, by the end of this process it can look fantastic, like prize pony tails. You wouldn't know what a journey that hair has been on."
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| By | freeamfva |
| Added | Jun 7 '22 |
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